It was a pleasure to help out at the Kingborough Tigers Juniors canteen at the Kingston Beach Oval on Friday (18.08) with my fellow candidates Cr Richard Atkinson and Amanda Midgley.
Our local sports teams bring joy, community spirit and identity. For our young people, they provide fundamental movement skills that they take with them throughout their lives. It was marvellous to be in amongst the excitement, the energy and the infectious positivity of the friends, parents, siblings and supporters who were in attendance. When I finally found him among the throng, Richard Atkinson was beaming; "quite the hive of activity, isn't it?"
It was truly a delight. Another example of what makes Kingborough a great place to live.
Sports grounds and their facilities like the Twin Ovals, the Kingborough Sports Centre and the Kingston Beach Oval with its Kingston Crows Cricket Club rooms are vital infrastructure that are part of the beating heart of our community.
I grew up training in Gymnastics at the Kingborough Sports Centre. When I first started the new facility had not yet been built. All those years ago, we trained where High Performance Cricket Tasmania is today. Although I remember it fondly, practising pommel horse sandwiched between the cricket nets and the zincalume was a cramped experience. In the nearly two decades I've been training and playing sports in Kingborough I've witnessed significant change. As I was growing up, getting bigger and needing more space, the community was too. And its facilities need to keep pace.
As a Director on the Board of Gymnastics Tasmania, part of my work is to be the Chair of their Facilities Committee. I have been privileged to hold discussions about everything from small equipment grants right up to multimillion dollar multi-sport facilities. Gymnastics, like many sports in the Kingborough area, will benefit from long-term planning.
We need to think beyond a three or four year election cycle and instead be courageous enough to think about what our community might want and need in thirty years and in fifty years.
From a public health stand-point, an investment in local sports leads to better health outcomes and is an important part of any preventative health strategy.
Sports grounds are not just places to have fun and get healthy, they are also a place of incredible social importance, to enhance our lives, to connect with our peers and to join together in common cause. This is why I am so supportive and so proud of our local sporting clubs and organisations and why I think it is imperative that our Council gives them the support they need into the future.